Art

VIA the New York Times,
WASHINGTON—The poet Allen Ginsberg, who died in 1997, adored life, feared death and craved fame. These obsessions seemed to have kept him, despite his practice of Buddhist meditation, from sitting still for long. He was constantly writing, teaching, traveling, networking, chasing lovers, sampling drugs, pushing political causes and promoting the work of writer friends.
In the early 1950s he began to photograph these friends in casual snapshots, meant to be little more than souvenirs of a shared time and ethos. Years later his picture taking — often of the same friends, now battered by life or approaching death — became more formal and artful, as if he were trying to freeze his subjects’ faces and energies, and to show off his photographic skills, for the history books.
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If you've ever picked up a copy of Tricycle you've probably seen Coyote Man, artist Neal Crosbie's recurring coyote cartoon. Over the years we've followed Coyote Man past pine trees, up Mt. Fuji, over land on horseback and on foot, and even onto the face of a dollar bill. Now we can track him from the moment of creation---in Crosbie's California studio. The ink painter's website now offers a virtual tour of Coyote Man's home, check out the video here here.
As for Coyote Man's creator, here's the news from his neck of the woods:
Lately besides painting pictures of clouds and pine trees, I've been singing songs which are unsteady and short. Songs in gratitude to the Buddhas and songs of apologies to the salmon.
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Tim McHenry never fails to impress. The Rubin Museum of Art's Director of programming, Tim produces series of talks that just get better and better. This time, he's making something out of nothing. Literally. He has put together a series of talks about, well, nothing. Among many others in the series, Oliver Sacks will speak with John Dugdale about "seeing nothing"; Nico Muhly and Andrew Solomon will talk about "lacunae"; and Peter Sellars and Raj Patel on the "economics of nothing.
Other participants include Laurie Anderson, Robert Wilson, Even Ensler, Lama Surya Das and many, many more.
I'll make as many as I can. The RMA is in Manhattan's Chelsea district. For more information, check out the website.
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The Ajanta Caves in Aurangabad, India, are rock-cut cave monuments that were crafted in between the second century BCE and the eighth century CE containing paintings and sculptures that are true masterpieces of Buddhist art. After being abandoned sometime around the 8th or 9th century CE, the caves were long forgotten until they were rediscovered in 1819 when a man accidentally stumbled upon an entrance while trying to navigate his way through the tangled brush.
Today, a piece was published on the Washington Bangla Radio website containing beautiful photographs from a recent visit to the caves.
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Sweetcake Enso is putting on a traveling art exhibition. There's a list of confirmed venues on the website. And Here's the press release, with a cool piece by one of the participating artists, Max Gimblett. The first call for submissions ended September 1:
In American culture Zen is often represented by the Enso, a calligraphic circle, to the extent that the Enso can be regarded as a logo for a brand identity. However, the Enso is truly known for the singularity of the mark as an expression of both presentness and emptiness. Sweetcake Enso draws attention to the abstract circle as a symbol of presentness in daily life, and opens out the traditional calligraphy of the Enso to include the work of Buddhist artists that is thriving in the contemporary art context. Alongside of Zen Master Nonin Chowaney’s traditional calligraphy will be that of artists more internationally known in the contemporary art context, such as Sanford Biggers, Noah Fischer, and Max Gimblett. It will also include the work of local community artists, and is traveling from Zen center to Zen Center in order to showcase their work in the context of larger Buddhist community. There are currently five Zen Centers on the east coast that are participating in the exhibit: Empty Hand Zen Center, the Village Zendo, Brooklyn Zen Center, Zen Center of Syracuse, and the Rochester Zen Center; and two on the west, the Olympia Zen Center and the San Francisco Zen Center.
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